Month: December 2003

I got a Nigerian spam at work today (the filters at work tag most spam but don’t block it). Sometimes these things can be really amusing, like this line:

This fund – US$10.5Million which is now in the ESCREW ACCOUNT of this bank came about after all efforts to trace, the NEXT OF KIN of one MR. DANIELLE TOTTI an Arc hectic from MALIAN, ITALY, failed.

In these days when the “e-” prefix is nauseatingly overused (e-commerce, e-business, e-banking, e-this, e-that), I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone would offer me an opportunity to get e-screwed.

I got a Nigerian spam at work today (the filters at work tag most spam but don’t block it). Sometimes these things can be really amusing, like this line:

This fund – US$10.5Million which is now in the ESCREW ACCOUNT of this bank came about after all efforts to trace, the NEXT OF KIN of one MR. DANIELLE TOTTI an Arc hectic from MALIAN, ITALY, failed.

In these days when the “e-” prefix is nauseatingly overused (e-commerce, e-business, e-banking, e-this, e-that), I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone would offer me an opportunity to get e-screwed.

No, I’m not talking about the failed attempt to re-create the Wright brothers’ first flight, although it might be ironic that this occurred in the week of their 100th anniversary, as a reminder of the ubiquitous effect of their invention on commerce. I ordered a Christmas gift for a nephew from Amazon.com Wednesday. Normally I refuse to pay extra for fast shipping, partly because I’m a cheapskate, and partly because I abhor the increasingly rushed mentality of our society, where everything is urgent and nothing can wait. But, in this case, wanting to assure delivery well before 12/25, I opted for the UPS second-day air option; Fed Ex overnight really did seem like overkill.

The weather’s not really conducive to playing outside, and I’m not feeling particularly creative, so I’ll be lazy and resort to posting this picture a friend sent me. It’s a little coincidental, since just yesterday I’d been talking to someone else about the recent lack of humor via email. A couple of years ago, networks were flooded with stuff like this as people forwarded jokes to everybody in their address book. Some of the material was really creative, and a lot of it was repeats of jokes that I heard on the playground 30-40 years ago. Recently, the flood diminished to a trickle, probably for several reasons. I think the novelty of emailing jokes wore off; people began to realize that a lot of the stuff wasn’t really very funny; mailboxes were getting so full of spam that people resisted adding to the clutter; employers started cracking down on stuff circulating through corporate networks; viruses made people leery of sending or opening attachments; etc. But this showed up in my mailbox this morning, and it’s obviously fairly recent considering the subject. Since starting this blog, I’ve become less likely to circulate stuff like this via email to people who may have gotten tired of inboxes full of corny humor; I’m more likely to post it here so people who want it can come see it. So here it is.

Yet another episode of a Google search yielding an ironically bizarre but appropriate result. There are messages circulating through the netsphere encouraging people to go to Google, enter the word “failure” (without quotes), and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button for the site that Google thinks most closely matches your search. Try it. Unfortunately, these amusing items don’t last forever, as the Google database gets updated and search results change. If you’re scratching your head wondering what’s so funny about the result, it’s possible you didn’t see what I saw. In that case, here is where Google sent me searching for failure.

Last week I posted the “quote of the month”. But, like everything else here, I suppose regularity is not a strong point. It’s tough to know when I might stumble across something worth mentioning. I ran into a couple of items recently that I thought were worth noting, even though it hasn’t been a month since the last “quote of the month”. Maybe that makes these “quotes of the week”. I don’t know if that makes them less worthy, although they are somewhat more depressing.Continue reading “More Quotes”

It’s been a virtually spam-free week here in my new home on the web. And it’s not because the spammers are taking a holiday break. My Qmail logs report that, since the shields went up on Monday morning, over 600 chunks of spam have been deflected. What’s the secret? Nothing new and innovative, just an idea whose time has definitely come: real-time source blacklisting. Simple, efficient, and effective.

Commenting on a complaint from a Mr Arthur Purdey about a large gas bill,
a spokesman for North West Gas said, “We agree it was rather high for the
time of year. It’s possible Mr Purdey has been charged for the gas used up
during the explosion that destroyed his house.”

“Wardriving” is the term geeks use to describe driving around with a laptop looking for insecure wireless networks to hack. So what do you call driving around with a laptop and no pants, hacking wireless networks to download kiddie porn? Bad fiction? A whole slew of articles vouch for the fact that it really happened in Toronto. The ironic part is that the schmuck got caught for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Guess he got a little distracted. A good GPS navigation program on that laptop might have prevented that. And, as somebody mentioned, this points out a serious danger of insecure networks: the network owner might be held responsible for its use. This was a residential connection that got hacked; if Walter hadn’t been caught .. um … redhanded … out in the street, investigators might have wanted to talk to the homeowners about what kind of sites they had been visiting.